Fresh Legal Jab At 'The New Yorker'

On account of The New Yorker's portrayal of him, Daniel Wemp claims he is in hiding and fears for his life. A 30-page amended complaint filed Friday in New York State Supreme Court contends that a story in the magazine about tribal violence in Papua New Guinea generated such anger toward Wemp among his fellow tribesmen that he can't return to his highlands village or hold a job.

"Vengeance Is Ours," by Pulitzer Prize-winning academic Jared Diamond, appeared in the April 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker. Wemp and co-plaintiff Isum Mandingo say it falsely depicts them as complicit in multiple murders, promoting rape and sanctioning prostitution, and is "largely fiction." Filed by Wemp's new lawyer, Jack Litman, who represented Robert Chambers in the infamous "Preppie Murder" case, the amended complaint raises the demand for damages to some $45 million from an initial $10 million in the original suit filed in last April. (See "New Guinea Tribesmen Sue The New Yorker") Advance Publications, publisher of The New Yorker, filed an answer to the complaint, denying every charge of inaccuracy and defamation. It contends the plaintiffs offer no proof for many of their statements, such as the claim that since the story ran, Wemp has been "persona non grata in his own homeland."

The latest filing identifies 24 separate passages in the story Wemp and Mandingo say are bunk. For example: Diamond's account says 30 people lost their lives during a three-year clan war that began after a pig ransacked someone's garden. The complaint says only four people died, the war lasted three months and the conflict didn't start over a pig in a garden, but an argument over a card game. The filing claims Wemp wasn't even a participant in the clan war: "At the time of the fighting, Wemp was working some 200 miles away at the coast, in a city called Madang."

The suit claims The New Yorker ran the story with no "independent verification or fact checking." The New Yorker counters that the story was vigorously factchecked by a trusted editorial staffer and stands by its account. Diamond has cited Wemp, Diamond's former driver in New Guinea, as his chief source for the story. Diamond did not immediately return calls for comment.

The suit is based on a 40,000-word study on The New Yorker story by Rhonda Roland Shearer, director of the New York City-based Art Science Research Lab, which runs a media ethics project dubbed stinkyjournalism.org. Diamond is a best-selling author and winner of a National Science Medal and the MacArthur Foundation's "genius award."